“Sometimes.”
“Do you ride in the dark?”
“Yes. Do you study the Quran, Hamid?”
“Of course.”
“And are you Shia?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know what Sunnis are?”
“Muslim, but not like me.”
“That’s right. I’m Sunni.”
Hamid pinched his nose, apparently uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken.
“Do you know if there are other Sunnis around here?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where they live?”
“That way.” Hamid pointed west with his stick, toward the mountains.
“Do you know how far?”
“Closer to the mountains. My father says to stay away from them. They make noise sometimes.” The last of the sheep had dribbled past them. Hamid kicked a donkey’s flank. The animal grumbled and trudged forward. “Good-bye, mister.”
Wells waved good-bye. Gaffan pulled up, lowered his window. “What was that?”
Wells explained. “You’ve got to be kidding,” Gaffan said.
“Don’t you know by now that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good?”
THEY PASSED A ONE-LANE bridge over a dry streambed. Until now the land had been open and unfenced. Ahead, both sides of the road were fenced with strings of rusting wire that hung between wooden posts. Wells was a child again, on a road trip with his dad, east through Montana and Wyoming, on the way to Kansas City. His first bigleague baseball game. He was six.
He rarely got to spend much time with his father, who spent most waking hours in the operating room at the hospital in Hamilton. More than once along the way, he’d told himself to remember, remember the diners where they ate and the gas stations where they stopped, as though he could make the trip last forever if he burned it deep enough into his brain. Of course, now the details had vanished. Wells remembered only being obscurely disappointed that his father didn’t seem more excited to be with him. But this landscape, so unexpected and so familiar, stirred an emotion stronger and purer than nostalgia.
He slowed. Gaffan stopped beside him, ending his reverie. “See something?”
“Nothing at all.” They moved on, approaching the flanks of the Lebanon range. The hills rose and the land crumpled and the road turned to gravel. Wells imagined lines tightening on a topographic map. He rode slowly, his legs spread wide for balance, feet off the pegs. The road turned along the base of a ravine and was blocked by a gate topped with thick strands of razor wire. Behind the gate, the road swung left and disappeared behind a hill. Wells clicked on the GPS in his pocket to save the location, then turned to Gaffan and twirled a finger:
For the rest of the afternoon, they repeated the drill. Wells saved three more possible locations, fenced areas or walled houses that looked suspicious.
The sun had disappeared behind the mountains by the time they rented rooms at the Palmyra Hotel in Baalbek. Directly across from the temple ruins, the Palmyra had a long and glorious history. The Germans had occupied it during World War I, the British in World War II. The hotel still had a certain faded glamour, with stained-glass windows and overgrown trees in its yard. But its rugs were threadbare and its showers offered only cold water.
Wells and Gaffan cleaned up and sat in the back garden, drinking lukewarm, too-sweet coffee. As far as Wells could tell, they were the hotel’s only guests.
“You think we found it?”
“Could have. I already called Ellis. Asked for fresh day and night overheads”—satellite photographs. “For all four locations, but especially the first.”
Wells had also asked whether the agency had any new information on the Jeddah bombing or the earlier attacks. The answer was a predictable and dispiriting no. The agency was so focused on Al Qaeda that this new group had caught it wrong-footed. Wells had kept Abdullah’s suspicions about Saeed to himself. Wells trusted Shafer, but it was always possible that Duto or someone even higher up would decide that the United States would gain by leaking information about Abdullah’s problems to MI6 or the Mossad. Wells preferred not to take that chance.
“So will they help?”
“He wouldn’t promise, but I think so. It’s in their interest. Waiting will hold us up for at least one night, maybe two, but I don’t care. I want to know what’s on the other side before we go over that fence.”
“Then how do they get the overheads to us?”
“Gmail.”
“You really think they’re going to send Keyhole imagery to you on Gmail.” The Keyhole was the National Reconnaissance Office’s finest toy, able to read license plates from space.
“They may degrade them, but yes.”
“Because they want us to go in, even though Shafer told you not to.”
“Correct.”
“Hell of a game.”
“The best,” Wells said. “And the worst.”
CHAPTER 14
THE SATELLITE SHOTS FILLED THE WALL-SIZED FLAT-PANEL SCREEN in Shafer’s office, as clear as life. Maybe clearer. Thanks to mirrors and lenses machined to ten-millionths of a meter, the fifth-generation Keyholes could take daylight photos from low earth orbit at five-centimeter resolution — about two inches.
With five-centimeter resolution, the photos revealed not just the number of men in a unit but also fine tactical details, such as the weapons they carried and whether they wore beards. The NRO promised that the next generation of satellites would reach one-centimeter resolution, enough to distinguish individual features. “Face from space,” the program was called.
Shafer remembered when one meter had been state-of-the-art. And he remembered when the overheads had been couriered around Washington in armored vans. These days the process was digital, start to finish. Data and imagery moved between the CIA and other three-letter agencies at the speed of light on an encrypted fiber- optic trunk line that circled Washington.
Shafer felt he’d made the transition pretty well. Technology didn’t scare him. He’d watched the agency go from analog to digital, watched it suffer through Aldrich Ames and Wen Ho Lee, watched its top targets move from walled palaces in Moscow and Beijing to nameless caves in Pakistan. He didn’t count himself as overly nostalgic. In truth, the CIA was probably more effective now than it had been during the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union had left it without a mission. The chaotic years after September 11 had been worse. George Tenet, the director at the time, proved to be the ultimate kiss-up and kick-down manager, never letting the facts get in the way of what the White House wanted to hear.
But since Tenet’s resignation in 2004, the agency had slowly rebuilt itself to face the new threat. The clandestine service hired as many Arabic speakers as it could find and pushed toward the front lines in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. At home, the intelligence directorate encouraged debates, fighting the groupthink that submerged unpopular positions.
Yet the CIA’s new vigor had come at a price. In the short term, drone strikes and coercive interrogations disrupted Al Qaeda and contained attacks. But as long as average Egyptians and Pakistanis believed that the United
